ANN: Veusz 1.5 released

[Jeremy Sanders]

Veusz 1.5
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Velvet Ember Under Sky Zenith
-----------------------------
http://home.gna.org/veusz/

Veusz is Copyright (C) 2003-2009 Jeremy Sanders <jeremy at jeremysanders.net>
Licenced under the GPL (version 2 or greater).

Veusz is a Qt4 based scientific plotting package. It is written in
Python, using PyQt4 for display and user-interfaces, and numpy for
handling the numeric data. Veusz is designed to produce
publication-ready Postscript/PDF output. The user interface aims to be
simple, consistent and powerful.

Veusz provides a GUI, command line, embedding and scripting interface
(based on Python) to its plotting facilities. It also allows for
manipulation and editing of datasets.

Changes in 1.5:
 * EMF export (requires pyemf and PyQt snapshot)
 * Character encodings supported in data import
 * Rewritten stylesheet handling. User can now set defaults in document
   for all settings. This is now under the Edit->Default Styles dialog.
 * A default stylesheet can be loaded for all new documents (set in
   preferences dialog)
 * Linked datasets saved in documents now use relative filename paths
   (with absolute paths as fallback)
 * Axes can now have text labels of points plotted along them (choose
   "labels" as axis mode)
 * Dataset points can be scaled to different sizes according to another
   dataset (this is the "Scale markers" option for point plotters)

More minor changes
 * Custom delimiter support in CSV data importer
 * Add SetDataText and support text in GetData in command API
 * \dot and \bar added to LaTeX renderer
 * Option to change icon sizes displayed
 * Rearrange toolbar icons and create data and widget operation toolbars
 * Zoom button remembers previous usage
 * Conversion from 1D->2D datasets more robust
 * Expression datasets can now be a constant value
 * Uses colors form theme better and allow user to change some UI colors
   in preferences
 * Fix contours if coordinates can be infinite (e.g. log scaling with zero
   value)
 * nan/inf are no longer ignored when the ignore text option is selected in
   import dialog

 * Several other minor UI changes and bugfixes

Important note
 * As the way defaults are used has been rewritten, default values are
   no longer saved on a per-user basis but are saved in a stylesheet and
   is saved in the document. You cannot currently set defaults on a widget-
   name basis.

Features of package:
 * X-Y plots (with errorbars)
 * Line and function plots
 * Contour plots
 * Images (with colour mappings and colorbars)
 * Stepped plots (for histograms)
 * Bar graphs
 * Plotting dates
 * Fitting functions to data
 * Stacked plots and arrays of plots
 * Plot keys
 * Plot labels
 * Shapes and arrows on plots
 * LaTeX-like formatting for text
 * EPS/PDF/PNG/SVG/EMF export
 * Scripting interface
 * Dataset creation/manipulation
 * Embed Veusz within other programs
 * Text, CSV and FITS importing

Requirements:
 Python (2.4 or greater required)
   http://www.python.org/
 Qt >= 4.3 (free edition)
   http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/  
 PyQt >= 4.3 (SIP is required to be installed first)
   http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/pyqt/
   http://www.riverbankcomputing.co.uk/sip/
 numpy >= 1.0
   http://numpy.scipy.org/

Optional:
 Microsoft Core Fonts (recommended for nice output)
   http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
 PyFITS >= 1.1 (optional for FITS import)
   http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits
 pyemf >= 2.0.0 (optional for EMF export)
   http://pyemf.sourceforge.net/
 For EMF export, PyQt-x11-gpl-4.6-snapshot-20090906 or better is
   required, to fix a bug in the C++ wrapping

For documentation on using Veusz, see the "Documents" directory. The
manual is in pdf, html and text format (generated from docbook).

Issues with the current version:

 * Due to Qt, hatched regions sometimes look rather poor when exported
   to PostScript, PDF or SVG.

 * Clipping of data does not work in the SVG export as Qt currently
   does not support this.

 * Due to a bug in Qt, some long lines, or using log scales, can lead
   to very slow plot times under X11. This problem is seen with
   dashed/dotted lines. It is fixed by upgrading to Qt-4.5.1 (the
   Veusz binary version includes this Qt version). Switching off
   antialiasing in the options may help this.

If you enjoy using Veusz, I would love to hear from you. Please join
the mailing lists at

https://gna.org/mail/?group=veusz

to discuss new features or if you'd like to contribute code. The
latest code can always be found in the SVN repository.

Jeremy Sanders